Large-eddy simulations on distributed shared memory clusters

The practicality of Large-eddy simulation (LES) of turbulent combustion, as is found in gas turbine engines, on clusters of commodity PC-based symmetric multi-processor (SMP) systems in 2-, 4-, and 8-way configurations has been investigated. Bandwidth demands from both memory and networking in the b...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Journal of parallel and distributed computing Vol. 64; no. 10; pp. 1103 - 1112
Main Authors: Stone, Christopher, Menon, Suresh
Format: Journal Article
Language:English
Published: San Diego, CA Elsevier Inc 01.10.2004
Elsevier
Subjects:
Applied sciences
Cluster computing
Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD)
Computational methods in fluid dynamics
Computer science; control theory; systems
Computer systems and distributed systems. User interface
Distributed memory computing
Exact sciences and technology
Fluid dynamics
Fundamental areas of phenomenology (including applications)
Memory and file management (including protection and security)
Memory bandwidth
Memory organisation. Data processing
Network bandwidth
Parallel performance benchmarks
Physics
Software
Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD)
Parallel performance benchmarks
Memory bandwidth
Distributed memory computing
Network bandwidth
Cluster computing
High performance
Computational fluid dynamics
Benchmarks
Turbulent combustion
Distributed computing
Distributed shared memory
Distributed memory
Large eddy simulation
Bandwidth
Gas engine
Gas turbine
ISSN:0743-7315, 1096-0848
Online Access:Get full text
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Summary:The practicality of Large-eddy simulation (LES) of turbulent combustion, as is found in gas turbine engines, on clusters of commodity PC-based symmetric multi-processor (SMP) systems in 2-, 4-, and 8-way configurations has been investigated. Bandwidth demands from both memory and networking in the benchmark LES algorithm are shown to the primary performance inhibitors. Contention in the various SMP architectures tested is shown to compound these two hardware limitations. To investigate the ability of the parallel clustered systems, low-level hardware studies are conducted in conjunction with bench-marking of the LES application. The hardware tests focus on memory and communication contention under loads found in the LES algorithm. For comparison, the benchmarks are also applied to two industry leading high-performance super-computing architectures. It is found that contention in the 4- and 8-way SMP architecture studied here limits their applicability while the 2-way systems shows competitive performance and speed-up compared to its industry counter-parts. It is concluded that design-level combustion LES on clusters of commodity hardware, when equipped with sufficient memory and communication bandwidth, are a viable substitute for more expensive super-computing platforms.
ISSN:0743-7315
1096-0848
DOI:10.1016/j.jpdc.2004.08.001